That is correct, none of the analog outputs are necessary, just digital and USB. I will try your file tomorrow.

Vortexbox uses MPD as a local player but the GUI is Squeeze Center so I'm not sure how things are routed. The routine that has worked with ALSA is to set output to "hw" in the Vortexbox GUI and putty in to alsamixer and turn on my SPDIF output.

I'm not sure how our changes are going to affect network music streaming. When I have "hw" as output SPDIF sounds great on hard drive music but the built in Internet radio develops frequent ticks that sound like very high jitter. The internet radio works without ticks with output set to "default" but the SPDIF output is reduced to pure mud with very poor sound on hard drive music. The "hw" setting also introduces gaps between tracks that you do not have on USB output.

OK, I replaced default.pa with your file. I ran osstest and got sound from SPDIF with the tests marked with smilies below. The SPDIF-1 test emits a very ugly distortion from the right channel and clean audio from the left. Since I'm only concerned with SPDIF-0 I'm OK.

It is a fantastic way to create a NAS and music server on any old computer. In five minutes it will wipe a drive and set up a system that will autorip, store and playback music up to 24/192. The user interfaces are second to none. I use iPeng on an Apple Touch and also can control and stream from any computer on the network.

The only flaws that I seek to polish are the lack of gapless playback and the possibility of superior sound with OSS. Many of us would benefit if you had time and interest in testing the installation of OSS4 and documenting the instructions.

I am sure you would find a rapid solution hands on instead of me blindly experimenting.

You can Google gapless playback and have many explanations from others on this topic. I do not think that OSS4 is going to change my gaps between FLAC tracks since it has been cited that MPD (the core music player in Vortexbox can not do gapless playback of FLAC files) but I have listed that as one of my problems here in an effort to be complete.

Regarding my other problems, I fully expect that OSS4 can make a difference. I have spent weeks researching what others have reported on the internet regarding the use of OSS4 vs. ALSA and I am intrigued by the possibility.

To repeat myself from above, with ALSA I have to set my playback options to "hw" or "SPDIF" to get bit perfect playback on an external DAC. That is a basic performance minimum that I will require. Unfortunately that setting introduces new problems for Internet radio playback that are not acceptable.

Having followed the instructions from Cesium up until his last post here I currently have no sound output from anything on Vortexbox. I am waiting for the next steps. That should be simple to understand.

hifihere wrote:I do not think that OSS4 is going to change my gaps between FLAC tracks since it has been cited that MPD (the core music player in Vortexbox can not do gapless playback of FLAC files) but I have listed that as one of my problems here in an effort to be complete.

If I understood you correctly, you have gaps between FLAC files with MPD, ALSA and PulseAudio. Right?And your magic Vortexbox is, perhaps, installed on a very old computer of the last century. Right?

Last edited by igorzwx on Fri Nov 05, 2010 4:51 pm, edited 1 time in total.